BEA, Salesforce.com Join 's' Forces

The two systems providers collaborate on WebLogic Workshop 8.1 developer aids for Salesforce.com's development tool.

In a partnership that should enable enterprises to build composite applications without incurring additional expense, Salesforce.com announced this week that it will join the BEA Systems extensibility program and will work to build an enhanced, "software-as-a-service" version of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1.

The move further amplifies the benefits of Salesforce.com's sforce development tool, unveiled earlier this summer.

Spokespeople for both companies say that under the new agreement, the firms will deliver a co-branded solution designed to give developers pre-integrated access to all of the capabilities in the WebLogic Workshop 8.1 and sforce client/service application platforms. The offering is expected to give developers access to BEA's application development, portal and integration technologies, as well as the Customer Relationship Management infrastructure and Web service capabilities of sforce.

"By combining the benefits of software-as-a-service with the latest composite application tools, developers can quickly be successful in their integration and extension projects," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of the San Francisco-based salesforce.com. "[The collaboration] provides a complete client/service environment."

Benioff explained that developers who sign up for the new tool will receive free access to development versions of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 and the salesforce.com Developer Edition. Down the road, he added, enterprises will pay only for deployment of their solutions, eliminating much of the risk associated with traditional packaged enterprise software extensions.

At the San Jose, Calif., headquarters of BEA, Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Adam Bosworth predicted that the co-branded effort and enhancements to WebLogic Workshop 8.1 would ultimately revolutionize the development world as a whole.